The Trump Administration’s Complicated Obsession with Cities and Terrorism

After the 2016 bomb explosions in New York City that left 29 people injured, London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan (the first Muslim to take the role), offered a blanket warning for cities during a television spot: Terrorist attacks are “part and parcel” of living in major urban areas like New York or London, he said. The sound bite came to the attention of Donald Trump Jr. only after another terrorist attack in London in March of this year, when Khalid Masood drove a car into a group of pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, injuring 50 people and killing four. Trump Jr.’s reaction to Khan’s prescient warning was indignation: “You have to be kidding me?!” he tweeted at Khan, netting more than 20,000 likes. Donald Jr. plays no formal role in our government, save perhaps social-media troll.

There’s a particular tension to living in any metropolis during the ascendance of Trump. His administration has a bizarre love-hate relationship to cities, perhaps stemming from The Donald’s own fitful success in Manhattan society. Even while Trump’s luxury hotels continue to colonize the globe, and wife Melania and son Barron live in their gilded Trump Tower perch, the administration’s policies and Trump Jr.’s posturing constitute a conflicting belief system: The open city is a nasty place, dangerous in its diversity and vulnerable to attack, though it remains a trophy for the wealthy. The Trumps look down on the exposed streets from their luxury skyscraper apartment, ignoring that the two occupy the same space. It's a reminder of the work of Robert Moses, whose failed approach to rebuilding a city was to bulldoze non-white neighborhoods and erect something shiny and new.

On Twitter, Trump Jr. wedged himself in between city residents and their governments, just as his father continues to do. Not only is President Trump getting in the way of self-identified “sanctuary” cities protecting the rights of their immigrants from ICE raids and travel policing, but the New York Police Department says that Trump’s federal budget proposal would remove “the backbone of our entire counter-terrorism apparatus,” as the New York City police commissioner said in March. In fact, the budget proposal guts almost all of the NYPD’s federal funding, the same resources that go to ensuring city residents don’t have to expect that terrorist attacks will happen.

We have a Western-centric view of terrorism that emerges in how we discuss and define it, particularly when it comes to cities. Trump Jr. might be righteous about attacks that take place in New York, Paris, or London, but these incidents in the West don’t make a dent in the scale of global terrorism. Meanwhile, the president persistently refuses to identify guys like James Jackson, a white Baltimore resident who traveled to New York City specifically to murder a black man this March, as terrorists.

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Statistics depict a wider reality. The 2016 Global Terrorism Index report points out that the majority of casualties from terrorism, a full 72 percent, occur in Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Syria—not coincidentally including several countries that the U.S. has occupied and that factor into our ongoing, ambiguous war against extremists. In 2015, a report found that Baghdad was the most at-risk city for terrorism in the world. At that time, London ranked 400. Another report, by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2016, found that “terrorism and instability” are making cities “less livable”: Paris, Athens, New York, and Chicago all fell in the livability rankings from previous years, and Detroit ranked lowest for the U.S. at 57 out of 140. Yet Syria’s Damascus ranked last. Posing terrorism as a threat to a developed-world sense of “livability” presumes that it is possible to live any semblance of a normal life in the first place. In many cities that terrorism impacts, it is not the exception but the rule of daily life.

It’s easy to forget the larger picture and focus on the tragedies closest to home. Even in those cases, however, our language distorts just what “terrorism” means. Trump Jr.’s tweet suggests that terrorism is a foreign ideology that we have to keep out of our cities, a force with the coherence of ISIS. But according to the Global Terrorism Index, 98 percent of all deaths from terrorism in the U.S. since 2006 have been the result of lone actors with only tenuous ties to organized groups. This is apparent even in recent attacks, from the Boston Marathon bombing to the April shooting at a school in San Bernardino, where a man murdered his wife and a student, to the Pulse nightclub shooting last June.

The tweet also ignores the fact that cities have become a target of terrorism not because urban areas’ diversity foments extremism, or because New York City allows immigrants to live there, but because diversity has become a target of President Trump’s followers (the majority of whom Trump Jr. surely doesn’t place under the category of terrorism). Such is the case with Timothy Caughman, the black New Yorker stabbed by Jackson, the white supremacist mentioned earlier. Jackson staged the attack in New York City specifically to get more visibility for his actions; according to the district attorney working on the case, a “campaign of terrorism” was his clear objective.

When Khan says that cities “must be prepared” for terrorist attacks, he means that cities are targets because of their nature: a gathering of people from all over the world living, more or less, together. Attacks keep coming; Paris suffered yet another shooting on April 20, with ISIS claiming the assault. But the Trump team seems less invested in protecting cities than in continuing to blame them for attracting extremism. Bannon’s use of “globalist” as an insult for Jared Kushner reaffirmed this, as did Trump’s reaction to the latest Paris attack: "What can you say? It just never ends," he said.

In the U.S., cities are being forced to defend themselves against terrorism without being given the political freedom to decide what approach works best. We could barricade ourselves in every way possible, zealously filtering anything and anyone that comes in or goes out, as Trumpian nationalism would have it. Or we can accept some of the risk that comes with living in cooperation and trust that, in the end, we are safer together than we are apart.

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It calls to mind the urbanist Jane Jacobs’s dictum that in cities, “there must be eyes on the street.” Public safety isn’t merely police or surveillance, but is a result of lively communities—our friends and neighbors who inhabit shared public spaces make our cities safer. All of those eyes are there so we can watch out for each other. We can be aware that in cities, things can go wrong, but we can come together to make sure that they don’t. Jacobs says we must be “oriented to the street”; in contrast, the Trumps are still in their own gilded chambers, attempting to regulate what’s happening on the ground without bothering to engage with it or understand it first.

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